This tableau directly addresses issues of race and women’s work. The image on the ironing board—itself a traditional symbol of female labor—is borrowed from a well-known eighteenth-century print showing scores of Africans packed into a slave ship to cross the Atlantic. Saar’s construction also refers to the marking of enslaved people with branding irons, and to their enchainment in transit or as punishment. The “KKK” appliquéd to the sheet denotes the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, still active today in the United States. According to Saar, this work communicates “the political message that you can treat me as a slave and I’ll bend down—I’ll bend down to pick cotton, I’ll bend to do this, to be a laborer—but I will not break.”
Betye Saar
I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break, 1998
Ironing board with printed images and text, flat iron, chain, bedsheet with appliqués, wood clothespins, and rope
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Lynda and Stewart Resnick through the 2018 Collectors Committee. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.© Betye Saar.
photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
Rachel Federman: This is Betye Saar speaking in 2019 about the creation of I'll Bend, But I Will Not Break.
Betye Saar: Well, I had been working on this series about labor, starting primarily with slave labor, which is like picking crops or cotton, and something, then sort of moved it on into labor in the household. And then when I was at one of my local sources where I find material, which is the Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California, one of the guys that I usually find neat things from had this old wooden ironing board. And the shape of the ironing board reminded me of the shape of a ship, meaning the slave ship, the diagram of the slave ship with all the slaves, how they're situated in it. I had used that before, and I found it in a book about slavery, but that's part of my visual language, just like a blackbird or a crow for Jim Crow or a hand, a palm of the hand for your fortune or something like that, and some of the other astrological signs. But when I saw that, I immediately got this idea. I said, "Oh, that slave ship diagram would look really good on it." And the shape of it was also a tomb in a way, like a casket. So it had this kind of sad, ominous feeling about it. It just seemed to make a statement about like you get off the slave ship and then you're a slave. And you wash and iron and clean, or pick cotton or whatever you have to do.
Audio: LACMA